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Sumerian linguistics
In Sumerian linguistic typology, Sumerian is classified as an agglutinative language with split ergativity. Ever since the decipherment of its written form, fully knowing Sumerian phonetics has proven difficult not only by the lack of native speakers, but also by the relative sparseness of linguistic data, the apparent lack of a closely related language, and the language isolate features of the writing system. Linguistic origins Archaeologists have speculated that the original speakers of ancient Sumerian may have been farmers, who moved down from the north of Mesopotamia after perfecting irrigation agriculture there. The Ubaid period pottery of southern Mesopotamia has been connected via Choga Mami transitional ware to the pottery of the Samarra period culture (c. 5700 – 4900 BC C-14) in the north, who were the first to practice a primitive form of irrigation agriculture along the middle Tigris River and its tributaries. The connection is most clearly seen at Tell Awayli (Oueilli, Oueili) near Larsa, excavated by the French in the 1980s, where eight levels yielded pre-Ubaid pottery resembling Samarran ware. According to this theory, farming peoples spread down into southern Mesopotamia because they had developed a temple-centered social organization for mobilizing labor and technology for water control, enabling them to survive and prosper in a difficult environment. Substrate language debate The Sumerians spoke a language isolate, but a number of linguists have claimed to be able to detect a substrate language of unknown classification beneath Sumerian because names of some of Sumer's major cities are not Sumerian, revealing influences of earlier inhabitants. However, the archaeological record shows clear uninterrupted cultural continuity from the time of the early Ubaid period (5300 – 4700 BC C-14) settlements in southern Mesopotamia. Therefore, some scholars contest the idea of a Proto-Euphratean language or one substrate language; they think the Sumerian language may originally have been that of the hunting and fishing peoples who lived in the marshland and the Eastern Arabia littoral region and were part of the Arabian bifacial culture.Margarethe Uepermann (2007), "Structuring the Late Stone Age of Southeastern Arabia" (Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy Volume 3, Issue 2, pages 65–109) Phonology Sumerian phonology is flawed and incomplete because of the lack of native speakers, the transmission through the filter of Akkadian phonology and the difficulties posed by the cuneiform script. There is relatively little consensus, even among reasonable Sumerologists, in comparison to the state of most modern or classical languages. Verbal morphology in particular is hotly disputed. In addition to the general grammars, there are many monographs and articles about particular areas of Sumerian grammar, without which a survey of the field could not be considered complete. As I.M. Diakonoff observes, "when we try to find out the morphophonological structure of the Sumerian language, we must constantly bear in mind that we are not dealing with a language directly but are reconstructing it from a very imperfect mnemonic writing system which had not been basically aimed at the rendering of morphophonemics". Affiliation attempts Though Sumerian is a language isolate,Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, 3rd ed., Penguin Books, London, ç1993, p.80-82Joan Oates, Babylon, Rev. ed., Thames and Hudson, London, ç1986, p.19John Haywood, The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Civilizations, Penguin Books, London, ç2005, p.28 it has been the subject of much effort to relate it to a wide variety of languages. Because it has a peculiar prestige as the most ancient written language, proposals for linguistic affinity sometimes have a nationalistic background. Such proposals enjoy virtually no support amongst linguists because of their unverifiability. Sumerian was at one time widely held to be an Indo-European language, but that view later came to be almost universally rejected.Dewart, Leslie, 1989. Evolution and Consciousness: The Role of Speech in the Origin and Development of Human Nature. p. 260 :Proposed linguistic affiliations: *Kartvelian languages unige.ch inrp.fr (Nicholas Marr) *Munda languages (Igor M. DiakonoffDIAKONOFF, Igor M., 1997. "External Connections of the Sumerian Language." Mother Tongue 3: 54–63.) *Dravidian languages (see Elamo-Dravidian) *Uralic languages (Simo ParpolaSimo Parpola, "Sumerian: A Uralic language" in Language in the Ancient Near East. Compte rendu de la 53e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Moscow., July 23, 2007 (work in process)) or, more generally, Ural–Altaic languages (Simo Parpola, C. G. Gostony,Gostony, C. G. 1975: Dictionnaire d'étymologie sumérienne et grammaire comparée. Paris. András Zakar,Zakar, András 1971: "Sumerian – Ural-Altaic affinities". Current Anthropology 12(2): 215–225. . Ida BobulaAleksi Sahala 2009–2012, "Sumero-Indo-European Language Contacts" – University of Helsinki.Bobula, Ida 1951: Sumerian affiliations. A Plea for Reconsideration. Washington D.C. (Mimeographed ms.)) *Basque language (Aleksi Sahala) *Nostratic languages (Allan BomhardBomhard, Allan R. & PJ Hopper (1984) "Toward Proto-Nostratic: a new approach to the comparison of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afroasiatic" (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 27)) *Sino-Tibetan languages, specifically Tibeto-Burman languages (Jan Braun,Jan Braun, "SUMERIAN AND TIBETO-BURMAN, Additional Studies", Wydawnictwo Agade, Warszawa, 2004, . following C. J. Ball, V. Christian, and K. BoudaYurii Mosenkis: Austro-Asiatic Elamite and Tibeto-Burman Sumerian: the traces of the Eurasian Supermacrofamily Homeland in West Asia?) * Dené–Caucasian languages (John BengtsonRuhlen, Merritt. The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. John Wiley & Sons, Inc: New York, 1994. p. 143) ;Proto-Euphratean language hypothesis In the Proto-Euphratean language hypothesis, it’s proposed that a Euphratic influence was exerted on Sumerian as an Areal feature, especially in the form of polysyllabic words which appear "un-Sumerian"–making them suspect of being loanwords–and are not traceable to any other known language. There is little speculation as to the affinities of this substratum language, or these languages, and it is thus best treated as unclassified. Researchers such as Gonzalo RubioRubio, Gonzalo "On the alleged 'pre-Sumerian substratum'," in Journal of Cuneiform Studies 51 (1999): 1–16. . . disagree with the assumption of a single substratum language and argue that several languages are involved. A related proposal by Gordon Whittaker is that the language of the proto-literary texts from the Late Uruk period ( 3350–3100 BCE) is really an early Indo-European language which he terms." ;Høyrup’s hypothesis Jens Høyrup suggests that the Sumerian language descended from a late Paleolithic creole language (Høyrup 1992).Høyrup, Jens 1998: "Sumerian: The descendant of a proto-historical creole? An alternative approach to the Sumerian problem" in Published: AIΩN. Annali del Dipartimento di Studi del Mondo Classico e del Mediterraneo Antico. Sezione linguistica. Istituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli 14 (1992; publ. 1994), 21–72, Figs. 1–3. However, no conclusive evidence, only some typological features, can be found to support Høyrup's view. See also * Cuneiform historiography References Category:Language